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Dear Journal/Editor, I have pledged to spend the majority of my time reviewing for open-access outlets, and have already reached my limit for closed outlets this year. I can only agree to review this manuscript if the publisher agrees to make it open access within 12 months, as most publishers already do for papers presenting NIH-funded research, or if the authors post a pre-print in an institutional or university repository.

For many of us, a guiding principle is that taxpayers and students paid for our research, so they ought to be able to read it. I don’t see any insurmountable obstacles remaining to achieve open access for almost all academic research. But progress toward that goal has been slow. For the reasons given above, the pledge would accelerate progress.

Arriving at this version of the pledge has been a struggle. Every researcher has their own priorities and constraints. I’ve tried to create a pledge that lots can sign onto, while still including a specific concrete commitment rather than just things like I will attempt to… or I will try to… The hoped-for result is a mass of people having made a specific commitment, which might make more of a splash than a vague pledge. So I hope you’ll sign on even if something best for you would be broader or have different emphasis.

There are many ways to support open access. One good step is ensuring that even the content of your closed-journal papers are freely accessible, and on a official website indexed systematically by academic search engines. Deposit the final draft of your articles (this version is owned by you even if you sign away copyright of a journal’s typeset version) in your institution’s repository. Stevan Harnad explains in this presentation.

Quotes

The easiest thing... is simply not volunteering our labor to lock academic writing away from the public -Nick Montfort
This is the last article that I will publish to which the public cannot get access -Danah Boyd
I will not submit my academic writings to journals whose policies prevent me from continuing to make them available, free of charge -Terrance Tomkow
Academic publications should be available for the world to read, to learn from, to build upon
-Ben Adida
Editors and editorial boards are not indentured servants. If the publishers will not price reasonably, why not resign, or better yet start a nonprofit journal with the same constituency but
a new name?-Ted Bergstrom
The least we should expect is that the outputs of this tax-payer funded activity should be freely available to all.-Martin Weller
It is hard to understand why we should continue to give the research away to commercial publishers and then buy it back at an enormous price.-JP Conley & M Wooders
The countries we work with can’t afford journals; they’re already paying an arm and a leg for textbooks.-Sir John Daniel
The academic community is only hurting itself, and its long term public support, by keeping its knowledge behind high subscription walls-Andrew Carr